Dropped Keys

This exercise was inspired by Margaret Werry’s queries, in “House Arrest: Museological Performance, Animacy, and the Remains of Rural America”, on a museum in a decaying rural town in Minnesota dedicated to a dead resident of the community who collected everything he could from the town and his life, refusing nothing out of a concern for relevancy or value. This challenges more traditional museums that curate, narrate, and freeze an object’s life rhythm within a specific meaning or history. I think the implied action in this object, combined with its unexpected contents, and humble materials, invites the viewer to look closely and engage in what Barad, in Meeting the Universe Halfway : Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, defines as diffractive reading, “a way of attending entanglements in reading important insights and approaches through one another.”

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